Tuesday 22 July 2008

The New Blasphemy

"You can say what you like about Jesus, Mary and Joseph, but say anything reviling, scurrilous or ludicrous about a climate change scientist and you will be punished. You won’t receive a literal lashing, but you will get a metaphorical one. Speak ill of a climate expert and you’re likely to be stuck in the stocks of the public media and branded as a fact-denying, truth-distorting threat to public morals."

This from an article at spiked-online.com where Bredan O'Neill responds to Ofcom's censure yesterday of the Channel 4 documentary "The Great Global Warming Swindle". The Ofcom document is well worth a read and is worrying regardless of where you stand on the Climate Change debate.  Surely no reputable science can be pursued without robust challenge and to make such challenge off limits is ultimately anti-scientific. Anyway the scientific bodies concerned carry such clout that they hardly need defending from Channel 4 ....... unless they are worried that Joe Public might begin to believe that their theories are not completely water-tight? Oh and before you ask ... No I am not a Creationist? I believe in Evolution and other good Science.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wasn't questioning climate change but rather the 'green' alternative lately and most (even the more open-minded of readers) questioned why I would be questioning at all.

Anonymous said...

Yes - it reminds me of Twenty Major's book - Has the whole planet been brainwashed? And incidentally I am not saying either that it is all rubbish but I do question our role in carbon levels and the presumption that this is not just part of the natural cycle the Earth's existence. Our limited efforts will not come near the levels that these scientists say we would need to achieve to stop/reverse GW